India News

Wait For Avengers: Infinity War Is Over: Records Biggest Advance Bookings After Baahubali 2

By Aparnna Hajirnis

The Indian box office has recorded one of the best advance bookings of all time for Avengers: Infinity War with the pre-release sales expected to close around Rs 20 crores. After Baahubali 2, the film records the biggest advance bookings despite being screened across only 2,100 screens in India.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

The advance ticket sales is better than films like Sultan, Tiger Zinda Hai and Dangal to name a few, however, the opening day collections might not be be as big as the films starring superstars like Salman Khan and Aamir Khan.

The film has had the best advance booking in Mumbai. Around 50 per cent of the tickets were pre-sold and the film is set to record one of the biggest single day collections of all time in Mumbai. In terms of occupancy, it will be the highest or the second highest this decade after Ek Tha Tiger, that too on a non-holiday.

Silverscreen spoke to a few fans in Mumbai, who have been part of Comic Cons and several groups related to superhero films. Leztah Fernandes, one such fan, says, “Ten years ago when the Marvel Cinematic Universe began with Iron Man, Marvel and comic book fanboyism were a niche territory. Small toy stores, book stores would sell comics books and maybe an odd Wolverine/Spiderman t-shirt. Now that the MCU has become tentpole summer blockbusters, geeking has gone mainstream.”

T-shirts with Marvel/DC design are available online. Comic Con has amplified this fanboyism, and brands who have nothing to do with comic books have jumped on the bandwagon. Even people who may not have read the comic books or watched the earlier films are now excited to watch Avengers or Deadpool. Of course, this comes with turf wars. While one section is happy that the number of fans are increasing, another section feels pretenders have arrived, crowding the Facebook groups and secret screenings.

The hype of the film has even rubbed off on the Mumbai Police with tweets on their official Twitter handle.

Here are some hilarious tweets posted by fans in anticipation of the highly awaited film.

Meanwhile, Bollywood has put off some of its big releases because of Avengers: Infinity War and of course the IPL season. Along with the Avengers, the only Bollywood movie that is releasing this week is Sudhir Mishra’s Daas Dev.

Bollywood’s hesitation makes sense as Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are extremely popular in India. In fact, a big chunk of the revenue for movies like Black Panther, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Thor: Ragnarok, came from the Indian territory. There have been times in the past when Bollywood movies suffered due to the release of a big budget Hollywood production at the same time. Films like The Jungle Book, Captain America: Civil War, X-Men: Apocalypse and The Angry Birds Movie have outdone films like Fan, Airlift, Sarbjit and a few others by a considerable margin (Example: The Jungle Book has earned Rs 183.94 crores till date, while Fan collected Rs 84.10 crores).

Another fan requesting anonymity said, “The movie release is a celebration in itself with so many superheroes sharing the screen-space. This has set the bar and superhero movies will only go bigger from here on.”

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Aparnna Hajirnis is a Freelance Contributor at Silverscreen India, and can be reached by email at editor@silverscreen.in